WHEN hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians fled their city after two hurricanes, they found the label "refugee" one more indignity. Having lost their homes, their city and sometimes their loved ones, the survivors thought "refugee" implied they'd somehow lost citizenship, too.

As difficult as life was for them then, the evacuees — and the federal government, it turns out — didn't grasp how hard it would remain. "Refugees" is indeed the right word for this population, though not because of any imagined foreignness. The hurricane survivors, including more than 100,000 in Houston, simply have more in common than not with refugees from wars and disasters abroad.

Changing a label may help them get this assistance. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita tore through the Gulf Coast, federal officials wrestled with two ways of looking at the displaced newcomers. One was as survivors of a disaster or emergency. The other was as refugees.

The disaster model won, landing the evacuees in the charge of FEMA and the Red Cross. Traditionally, these agencies offer emergency shelter and limited housing vouchers, then government help refurbishing their homes. After that, explains The Metropolitan Organization, which is aiding the evacuees, the disaster is considered over. Survivors are expected to get back on their feet.

This hasn't happened by a long shot with the Gulf Coast evacuees. That's because their experience really fits a different model: that of refugees.

Gulf Coast survivors differ from other American disaster victims — of tornados, say, or even Hurricane Andrew — in the historic number of displaced families, the breadth of the region made uninhabitable, and the collapse of the jobs and infrastructure that defined their existence. What they face is not a cleanup; it's construction, from scratch, of new lives.

Another element makes starting anew even more overwhelming. Houston's "refugees" were barely getting by in Louisiana. According to Zogby International, more than half of those using city housing vouchers earn less than $15,000 yearly, most are women with school-age children and 58 percent don't want to return to New Orleans. Only 15 percent have found jobs here.

This month, about 9,000 Houston evacuee households received letters from FEMA announcing their housing assistance will end June 30. The agency had committed to pay for up to a year's housing. The letters were another example of the agency's oft-demonstrated clumsiness in assisting victims in Katrina's aftermath.

Designating Katrina survivors refugees could help get them out of FEMA's clutches and over to the Department of Health and Human Services, which excels at aiding refugees. HHS has helped millions from war-torn locations around the globe to thrive here in the United States. HHS administers a holistic program, including 18 to 36 months of eligibility for housing, medical and psychological aid, and caseworkers for complicated paperwork involved in moving to new jobs, schools, insurance, medical care and housing.

As Mayor Bill White and conservative welfare expert Douglas Besharov both note, this approach is clearly the most suitable for New Orleans survivors. Emphatically, resettlement is not ongoing welfare: it's a finite, well thought-out and proven set of protocols for helping newcomers start anew.

The alternative — pretending the survivors can brush off their knees and reconstruct their old existences — is plain delusion.